"The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you."--Terry Eagleton

"It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be understood?--Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice."--Bryan Stevenson

Don't you think?

Josh Marshall notes fears of the apocalypse is bread 'n' butter for the NRA. Sen. Lindsey Graham opined at the recent Senate hearings that, while he didn't think we needed guns to oppose the inevitable tyranny of an out of control Federal government (Mr. LaPierre did bring it up), the Senator did think that an assault weapons ban would leave us all defenseless against the marauding mobs after the next natural disaster.

You know, like the mobs that burned New Orleans to the ground and rendered the SuperDome a hollow shell of Mad Max anarchy. Or the gangs roving the streets of Houston for the month-plus it took to clear all the downed trees and fully restore power after Hurricane Ike. Or the on-going apocalyptic horror that is now the Jersey shore.

Yeah, like when that happened.

I would say I don't know where they get these ideas, except I do. They get them from movies. From books, too, to some extent, but primarily from movies. Almost every movie scenario with a post-industrial nightmare for a setting, involves anarchy and tribal groups run by men with guns and cars (and how they run the cars without refineries or all the industrial infrastructure necessary to produce oil and gas is never explained). Men who are brutal, vicious, avaricious, power-hungry, and have an endless supply of bullets and weapons to fire them from (even though, as I said, there is no industrial base to supply, much less transport, these things). Society is gone along with the machines, and all that remains is brute force and coercion and evil; except, of course, for the one true hero. Who usually also has an endless supply of guns and bullets; except he's also usually bulletproof, and the bad guys never are.

It is from movies that Mr. LaPierre and Sen. Graham, et al., get their paranoid fantasies about the anarchy waiting just below the surface to break forth and consume us all. It has to be. Because when such things actually do happen, it usually involves fear of such anarchy, or it almost always involves one person, and unfortunately involves the rest of us. At least, that's what I learn from the news.

It's not the kind of story they make movies out of, though. Ironic, no?